Portrait of a Lady
by hyacinthian
Summary: And so the conversation slips... [MarkAddison]


A/N: A poem fic. The excerpts of the poem that I have included are italicized; the poem in question is "Portrait of a Lady" by T.S. Eliot.

* * *

_Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon  
You have the scene arrange itself--as it will seem to do--  
With "I have saved this afternoon for you";_

She sits on the loveseat, her legs neatly tucked beneath her, a warm mug in her hands. Her hair falls in damp ringlets around her face, and she smiles up at him, but the smile doesn't quite reach his face. He knows why they're here, and she knows that he knows. She just finds the pretense a lot more comfortable. She's always been strange that way.

"Where's Derek?" he asks.

She just sips at her tea, still steaming. Her eyes flicker with something he can't categorize, can't quantify, but her smile is sad. "He's working," she says with an ease he's unused to. "You know how he is."

He does, but he doesn't. They used to be the Trio, almost of Three-Musketeer-esque proportions. But he's never really invested himself in fiction, and he's invested too much of himself into this relationship. Since Derek and Addison have gotten together, things have been strange. Strained. He doesn't want to acknowledge it, and yet he's the only one who's willing. The one thing Derek and Addison are both incredibly skilled at is deflection. Lying. He thinks of Sister Pietrina who had a warm smile, wrinkles near the eyes--friendly enough until she found out you lied.

_Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,  
An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb  
Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid._

She raises an eyebrow in question, and he shakes his head. He's sitting so far from her, keeping himself at an arm's length. He's too weak to keep from giving in to her, and she knows of her power. Ever since he met her, he's always been prone to temptation. But maybe it was just some sort of cosmic practical joke. He loved her, and she loved Derek, who loved his work. It was some strange twisted quadrilateral. But he was never really good at geometry. He hated it, hated memorizing, hated keeping up with it.

She lit four candles, no more, no less. The room is dim with candlelight that he supposes should be romantic, but just seems unnecessary. Superfluous. She drinks her tea and he watches her, and the whole room is just silent. He almost wishes she had a pet. The scene is awkward, stilted, staged, and he feels wooden like an amateur actor. She sets the mug on the table, her fingertips moving to shift a coaster, and looks at him. "I want this to stop."

He swallows. "Fine."

"I can't--" She speaks in phrases that aren't phrases, words laden with meaning that she herself doesn't really understand. Somewhere, he thinks she should be aware of how much she's killing him in this moment. He doesn't tell her. He's always had a saving people thing. Like Rhett Butler with his damned lost causes. He's always been a martyr.

"I know."

She swallows, looking up at him in such contradictions. Strong face, strong jaw, strong set of mouth with the guiltiest looking eyes he's ever seen. Maybe she's always noticed, but never had the courage to speak.

_--And so the conversation slips  
Among velleities and carefully caught regrets  
Through attenuated tones of violins  
Mingled with remote cornets  
And it begins._

"I'm sorry," she says, her voice thick with emotion.

"It's not your fault," he replies, and it's true. It's not her fault, it's never been her fault. There's just been them, the trio, spinning and spiraling down. There's always been confusion and regret and things left unsaid, and he knows, somewhere deep down, that it'll end up with him against Derek. He knows one day their friendship won't be enough to save them, their little cross against a sea of evil is just too naive.

_"You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,  
And how, how rare and strange it is, to find  
In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,  
[For indeed I do not love it...you knew? you are not blind!  
How keen you are!_

He knows that as born and bred for this life as she is, she's sick of it too. The wealthy have never been good at saying things outright. They're always cautious, choosing their words with such soft steps, always walking on eggshells. Her brownstone with Derek is everything and nothing all at once. It's so clean, pristine. There's no dust, nothing. It's almost like specks of a life.

The brownstone has no flavor, nothing to distinguish it from anything.

She pushes a coaster with her fingertips, always with the tips of her fingers, like a child in a museum. She's almost too afraid to disturb the sanctity of her own home, almost too afraid to disrupt whatever threads of a life she's managed to cobble together. Her house is just as fragile as she is, and just as unwilling to admit the weakness.

She gets up and walks towards him, pulling him in for a kiss. Her lips brush softly against his in a misleading tenderness. And just as quickly as she came, she's gone, separating them with physical and emotional distance.

_Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins  
Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own  
Capricious monotone_

His veins thrum with a painful sense of urgency and he shuts his eyes against the pain. It doesn't help matters, doesn't help with anything. It's funny how acute things become when they're seen through a colored veil of pain. He hears the creak of the sofa cushions as she rises, the soft thud of her setting a glass down. When he opens his eyes, she slips two ibuprofen into his hand.

"Thank you," he whispers. He has no intention of taking them, never does. She just smiles and nods. They still have their parts to play. And hers is of the hostess, the wife. He sets the pills down on the coffee table, and just sips at the cold water. It sweats, condensation trickling down the outside of the glass like their lost dreams of togetherness and love. He embraces the pain, the small parade that goes on inside his skull. He has to. If he never did, he's not sure how he would've survived, how he would've lived to see this scene before him.

_Now that lilacs are in bloom  
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room  
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.  
"Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know  
What life is, you who hold it in your hands";_

She's always taken to assumptions and he shouldn't assume that the situation is any different with him. She moves from the loveseat again with a loud groan of leather and sits next to him. She takes his hand between hers, like the mug she held earlier, and kisses it. She's not the only one accustomed to loss.

She thinks of him as youthful, beneath her because she's married. They're essentially having an affair, but she doesn't like to think of herself as faulty. As flawed. He's willing to accept his faults and move on; he's never enjoyed dwelling anyway. But she does. She loves being stationary. In arguments, in life, she dwells. She'll bring up something from med. school that he'd long forgotten. He lives in the present and she lives in the past, and maybe that's why they'll never be able to be together. Not really. She's with him because she's thinking of Derek in the early stages of their relationship and he's with her because he's thinking of them _now. _

And if this ever turned on them, if they ever stopped the vicious cycle they're caught in, he thinks of how she'd use this against him. She lives in the past and he lives in the present, and there's no way to change the time difference. It's perpetual jet lag. He's always ahead or she's always behind but it's all the same.

_"I am always sure that you understand  
My feelings, always sure that you feel,_

It's always been about her, her wants and needs, her desires, dreams. He thinks about Derek and wonders if it'll ever be about them again, about their friendship rather than their individual couplings, publicized or not.

And this rut that she's so angry over? He knows that it's nothing to worry about, that they could move through it if they really wanted to. Maybe their hearts, their souls are finally catching up to what their hearts and their minds have been telling them all these years. Derek's being Derek, he's asserting himself, separating them. He recognizes the distance for what it is, not for what it could be or some strange definition or implication thereof. But Addison's always been caught up in the net of complex wording, of syntactical traps laced here and there. Sometimes, when he's drunk, he likes to think that in an alternate universe somewhere, she's a lawyer, and he's still the same, but she's the Addison that he knows exists somewhere beneath all the layers of duplicity and expensive foundation.

He wants to crack her, wants to figure her out. She is nothing if not an elaborate puzzle.

_You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles' heel  
You will go on, and when you have prevailed  
You can say: at this point many a one has failed._

He wants to think of himself as triumphant. Wants to see himself at the end with the prize, but somehow, he senses that he's never been born a winner. Was never meant to stand up at the top of Everest with a climbing axe and a grin. He was always meant to be Everest, Kilimanjaro--he's the one meant to catalyze those meant for success, meant for greater things. He's a stepping stone, and he's tired of being stepped on. But if he fights it, he's only fighting his own existence. And he'd be stupid to think that fighting himself is a battle he could win.

She thinks he's perfectly flawed. He's her picture of a perfect man. A stereotypical man. He drinks, womanizes, parties. He'll hit on anything that moves, and she interprets it as freedom. He interprets it as hell. Why has he always been relegated to this position of playboy, of player? He never wanted it. But when you split an atom, you get a mess. He's like a molecule of carbon monoxide, always searching for that extra oxygen molecule to bond with, always searching and grabbing, stealing. Killing everything in the process for his own desires, and never truly achieving it.

He understands the plight of carbon monoxide. Double bonds are a strong enough reason to fight.

_"I have been wondering frequently of late  
(But our beginnings never know our ends!)  
Why we have not developed into friends."  
I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark  
Suddenly, his expression in a glass.  
My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark._

She makes banal comments all the time. She's almost made a career out of it. She murmurs inanities with an easiness he's never seen before. Friendship has long disintegrated for the three of them as a whole, and he feels like they're trying to catch molasses with their hands open, watching the goo slip through the cracks with a strange slowness, and trying to stop it, but being unable to.

Maybe in ten years, he and Derek will forgive each other for everything they've done and realize the blame never lay with them, but with Addison.

Prometheus. Epimetheus. He is one, Derek is the other, though he's not too keen on finding that one out.

_Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,  
Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose_

She sits at the table and raises her glass of Chardonnay. She peers through the liquid, viewing the scene before her. He stands and she watches him talk with a blonde woman. She's met her. What was her name? Rebecca? Like the Daphne Du Maurier character, she thinks wryly. But maybe she's just being bitter.

Mark and Derek stand close together, their camaraderie almost repaired, held together with duct tape and weak promises, but healing nonetheless. Rebecca wears a diamond necklace and she sparkles beneath the light. Mark needs a woman who sparkles. She thinks he looks happy, and she wonders why she's suddenly envious. She wonders if this is how he felt in those earlier decades of their lives, their joint experiences.

She thinks of her behavior, her comments. She thinks of her selfishness. She's a bit like Scarlett O' Hara, she thinks. Selfishness and pride before realization. And by the time she has her epiphany, it is much too late to salvage anything.

_Not knowing what to feel or if I understand  
Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon..._

A man near the front raises his glass and shouts, "To the happy couple!" Rebecca is beaming in a Vera Wang gown. It's hard for her to forget that his new bride reeks of old money, stinks of it. But the woman herself is pretty nice, and it's horrific to think that after all she yelled at Mark, called him, he's managed to reform himself out of spite and find a nice rich girl. She has the feeling his marriage will outlast hers.

His eyes meet hers and she no longer sees the dark shells of pain. She no longer sees the shell of a man who flew halfway across the country to find her, to apologize, to get her to go back to New York with him. She doesn't see the shell of a man she left for Los Angeles, the city of artificial sunlight and happiness that placed a rose-colored filter over her eyes that burned way too quickly with no hope of replacement.

He grins at her.

She reformed him. Rebecca reformed him, and there is nothing she can do. Addison Forbes Montgomery--she was stuck between three men and now she has lost two of them for good. The only two that ever really mattered.

She yelled at Mark, railed at him for his giving in to temptation, but she has done him worse and realizing it now does no good.

The other guests clink their silverware and Mark kisses Rebecca, who tips her head back in a jolly laugh. Rebecca has rosy cheeks, and she feels resentful.

Mark meets her gaze with a new profound sadness, and she wants to turn away from it. It entrances her, pulls her in, drawing her ever closer like a black hole. His bright eyes burn her like a supernova, burn her with his perpetual happiness in her eternal dark. But the thought lingers in her mind that she gave him up, she was the one who ended them, she left. And if anything, she should be glad that he forgave her, loved her enough (as a friend, she reminds herself) to send her an invitation.

Derek laughs and punches Mark in the arm. She's been thrown out of the group. It used to be Mark and DerekandAddison, and now it's DerekandMeredith and MarkandRebecca. She's been replaced and she doesn't want to face the issue at hand. Is she really obsolete? No longer needed?

Mark looks at her.

_Now that we talk of dying--  
And should I have the right to smile?_


End file.
